Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)

See the following -

Security: Healthcare's Fixer-Upper

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | June 4, 2014

The alarming state of affairs, how the industry's slack security is bad for business and what some are doing to step it up...

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Stakeholders Look to Improve C-CDA as FHIR Matures

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 2, 2017

As the healthcare industry continues to wrestle with interoperability challenges, two standards are poised to play a central role in facilitating the electronic exchange of health information—one is a blunt tool for data sharing, while the other is a surgical instrument. First adopted in 2012 as part of the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT’s 2014 Edition final rule, the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) version 1.1—developed through the joint efforts of ONC and Health Level Seven (HL7) International—is now widely used among healthcare providers...

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The 'Post EHR' Era

John Halamka | Healthcare IT News | February 12, 2013

At BIDMC, we've already achieved 100% EHR adoption and 90% Meaningful Use attestation among our clinician community. Now that the foundation is laid, I believe our next body of work is to craft the technology and workflow solutions which will be hallmarks of the "post EHR" era. Read More »

The Era of Epic

John D. Halamka | Life as a Healthcare CIO | July 24, 2013

In the Boston marketplace, Partners Healthcare is is replacing 30 years of self developed software with Epic.   Boston Medical Center is replacing Eclipsys (Allscripts) with Epic.   Lahey Clinic is replacing Meditech/Allscripts with Epic.  Cambridge Health Alliance and Atrius already run Epic. Read More »

The Joy of Mentoring

Since 2016 is the 20th year I’ve served as CIO, I’ve given a great deal of thought to the various careers I’ve had and the roadmap for the 20 next years of my working life. In my late teens and 20s I was an entreprenuer running a 35 person software company while doing my medical and graduate school training. I was also a winemaker, home builder and engineer. In my early 30’s I was an Emergency physician, software coder, and data analyst. In my mid 30’s as a CIO, I focused on architecture, high reliability computing, and centralization of IT service delivery. In my early 40’s, I focused on disaster recovery, interoperability, and educational technologies..

The Meaningful Use Stage 2 Finish Line

Hospitals across the country have until September 30 to complete their 2014 reporting period for Meaningful Use Stage 2. Recently Ashish Jha and Julia Adler-Milstein published important articles in Health Affairs about the current state of EHRs  and Health Information Exchange .  What can we learn about the status of Meaningful Use Stage 2 across the country? Read More »

The ONC 10 Year Vision

On June 5th 2014, ONC released  “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure." The plan is divided in 3 year goals, 6 year goals, and 10 year goals. Five specific tactics support the strategies. Below is a summary of the report and a few comments from my Massachusetts experience that support the reasonableness of the ONC goals.

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The Rise of Telemedicine

As reimbursement evolves from fee for service to alternative payment models, incentives will shift from treating sickness to keeping the population healthy. New investments will be made in technologies that reach into the home and enhance care team communication. 2016 saw an acceleration of telemedicine/telehealth. 2017 will see exponential growth. Telemedicine is hard to define. It could be real time video teleconferencing between clinicians (a consult), between a patient and clincian (a visit), or group to group  (tumor board discussion). It could be the transmission of a static photograph, such as the poisonous mushroom/plant teleconsultation I do 900 times per year. It could be secure texting to coordinate patient care...

The Roles I Play

John Halamka | Healthcare IT News | January 15, 2014

As 2014 begins, I marvel at the evolution of the CIO role from 1997 to 2014. Gone are the days when my role was to serve as technical expert, configuring web servers, optimizing data bases, or simplifying code. [...] Here are a few examples of the roles I play today from the past few weeks: Read More »

The Words Healthcare CIOs Don't Want To Hear

Mike Millard | Healthcare IT News | June 3, 2014

No matter what your job, there are certain phrases – whether said by bosses, colleagues or clients – that are just plain unwelcome: words that foretell frustration and added workload at best, panic and red-alert crisis response at worst.

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UCHealth’s OpenNotes Journey: From a Few Docs to Enterprise-Wide Acceptance

Rajiv Leventhal | Healthcare Informatics | March 16, 2017

Although the OpenNotes initiative—designed to give patients access and ability to read visit notes online—has now reached 12 million patients in the U.S. alone, there have been challenges and pushback along the way, dating back to the beginning of the movement. In fact, says CT Lin, M.D., chief medical information officer (CMIO) at UCHealth, a 7-hospital, 400-clinic system in the Rocky Mountain region, the “original” OpenNotes was actually called “SPPARRO,” or “Systems Providing Patients Access to Records Online”...

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VA: More Education Needed On Blue Button Initiative

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | April 23, 2014

Only one-third of veterans are taking advantage of "Blue Button" capabilities to access the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' personal health record portal, My HealtheVet, but those who do so are pleased with it, according to a study published recently in the Journal of the American Informatics Association.  The Blue Button initiative enables patients to secure online access to their electronic records.

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We've been swindled

Paul Levy | Not Running a Hospital | June 24, 2015

...And the fraud is likely to be compounded.  The next step in the process is a forthcoming Department of Defense procurement of an EHR system to serve the military and its dependents, whether being treated at military healthcare facilities or other facilities in the communities in and around our bases and other military installations. As I understand, there is no language in this multi-billion dollar procurement that would require the vendor chosen to achieve interoperability with those EHRs in community facilities where the government will send its patients--or where they might end up for emergent care...

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Web-Based Tool Was First To Spot Ebola

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | August 12, 2014

Crowd-sourced technology saw the [Ebola] outbreak taking place in real-time, before WHO announcement...

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What is Patient and Family Engagement?

I recently participated in a nationwide (not the United States) healthcare IT planning effort and one recommendation was universal availability of patient portals. Several reviewers commented that patient portal is a loaded term - it implies that clinicians control the data and patients are given a view into it. One person said, “that’s so 10 years ago.” BIDMC has been working with patient/family shared medical records, Open Notes and various consumer-facing apps since 1999. Over that time we've discovered that patients typically do not want raw data, they want something actionable - the tools necessary to assist their navigation through the healthcare process...